Filed under: Misc. Humor, Posts, Travel | Tags: adulthood, Bermuda, Caribbean, diversity, humor, islands, office etiquette, parties, south, southern, speaking skills, subourbonmom, tourism, travel
Nature has balances: night and day, sunshine and rain, Quiet Talkers…and me.
For whatever reason, I am “blessed” with a loud, scratchy voice, and a Woody Woodpecker laugh that reverberates around a room somewhere near the decibel level of a Who concert. Oh don’t get me wrong, it’s come in handy a few times, like when I was coaching and lifeguarding. Now, however, it’s a little bit of an issue.
We were recently in Bermuda for a work event, and I realized I’d forgotten how quiet Bermudians can be. I understand why Bermudians talk the way they do—softly, leaning in slightly, as if someone might overhear the conversation and report it to the Royal Gazette. Actually, that is exactly what can happen when you have 60,000 alcoholics, er, residents, clinging to a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. That’s a lot of folks on a 20-square-mile island with something to say, which they do with a wit that is funny and brutal at the same time.
I used to live in Bermuda, so I know how loud we Americans can sound to the untrained ear. Eventually, after three years or so of being there, I got pretty good at lowering my voice, but that skill has clearly been neglected since we moved.
When it comes to social events, my friend Bruce has a favorite saying: “If you’re at a party and you can’t find the asshole, it’s probably you.”
Um, I’m pretty sure the people at the event last week in Bermuda thought it was me. There were about 40 Bermudians in the room, and I’m fairly certain everyone turned at one point or another in the evening and tried to figure out one of three things:
1) how they could rescue the poor Quiet Talker stuck with me;
2) who that woman was with the man-voice was and why wasn’t she wearing her hearing aide? OR
3) who let the Southern version of Fran Drescher into the party?
At first I was annoyed, and toyed with the idea of talking in my fake Long Island accent that makes my Southern skin crawl. (“Oh my Gaawud, Vinny…would you look at this gaawbage? I could get this at home for ‘tree daawllahs.”) But I was at work and had a professional image to maintain, so I decided to study the Bermudian Quiet Talker technique instead.
I have to say you Quiet Talkers have a way of drawing people in to listen to you that I envy. I never did figure out just what it was, except possibly my natural American inferiority complex, or maybe my American penchant for British accents, but either way I remained captivated.
Unfortunately, your verbal sparring is wasted on Loud Talkers. When you zing that witty insult at us, we often aren’t sure if we heard you correctly…so most of the time, we’ll just keep on plowing ahead, oblivious to your skills.
Yes, we are clearly two very different social species, but if nature didn’t provide some balance, and there were only Loud Talkers like me, the world would sound like a forest full of crows (or a tree full of Kiskadees, for you Bermudians), cawing and squawking at each other all day long. If there were only Quiet Talkers, the world would be filled with misunderstandings, because someone misheard someone else, rednecks would have to find some other way to communicate after a beer or six, and sports stadiums would sound like churches.
So in the interest of peace, diversity, and keeping sports teams employed, let’s keep the conversation going–we Loud Talkers will keep leaning in to hear what you have to say, and you Quiet Talkers keep leaning back and listening.
If the conversation stops, the silence will be deafening.
Filed under: Middle Age, Parenting, Posts, Travel | Tags: adulthood, cars, driving, family, humor, kids, Middle-Age, mom, parenting, parents, road rage, rules of the road, subourbonmom, teenagers, teens, traffic, travel, turn signals
Driving around with brand new teenage drivers, or soon-to-be-drivers can be like hanging out with an alcoholic at a party who’s just gotten back on the wagon. There is an enormous amount of self-righteousness packed into one place.
“Mom, you’re going over the speed limit.”
“Mom, the light turned green. Put your phone down.”
“Mom, I think that policeman is trying to wave you over….mom? Mom? Why have your eyes gone black??”
One of my biggest driving pet peeves is people who don’t use turn signals, especially at stoplights. FYI People—they are not optional or just a courtesy! They are required by law!
I can’t tell you how many drivers have seen me yelling and gesturing (with my windows safely up) as they paused in the middle of the intersection, looking bewildered as everyone waits for them to go straight because they forgot to put their turn signal on.
Daughter #1, our newest licensed driver, is now beginning to understand my frustration, and has come up with some of her own creative descriptions of these drivers, none of which can be printed here.
Daughter #2 however, has more fun pointing out the times when I myself forget to use my signal (as if!), or when, according to her, I wait to long to use it. The other day, we were getting ready to turn onto our street when apparently I didn’t use my signal until too late.
Daughter #1: “You didn’t use your signal, Mom.”
Me: “Yes, I did.”
Daughter #2: “Well, you waited long enough.”
Me: “Don’t mess with me today. It’s too hot.”
Daughter #2: “Why? What are you gonna do?”
Me: “Just–don’t. It’s not worth it.”
Long pause…
Daughter #2: “It’s worth it a little bit.”
Sigh……so please, in the interests of keeping people safe, and because playing chicken in the middle of an intersection isn’t cool, use your turn signals. IN the words of one of my youth group leaders back in the day, WWJD?
Filed under: Misc. Humor, Travel | Tags: adulthood, Birds, budget, construction, family, humor, kharma, lake, porches, south, southern, subourbonmom, travel, Virginia
Every now and then Hubby and I have a Come-To-Jesus meeting about our budget, where we both agree we eat meals out too often, among the other things we spend too much money on. That’s an easy way to cut back. Then we promptly go out with friends to a Mexican place and have beer and margaritas. I’m always lecturing the girls on not spending their money at restaurants, and to save it for something they really want—and they promptly go to a local dive called Satterwites and order breakfast. Shocker…
Come to find out, the Animal Kingdom isn’t much different than the People Kingdom in that regard. Nobody likes to eat what’s in their own house.
We (okay, really it was Hubby and friends) recently finished the back porch. I was the SOA (Sr. Outside Assistant, handling things like running to the kitchen for rum and cokes and beer). The porch is another dream come true (seriously, I’ve been thinking about it for years—BIG points for Hubby)—and then came the opportunity to get some good karma from the Animal Kingdom, to balance out the massive amounts of fish we’d been catching and eating. (I’m sure that someday I will come back as a catfish—that will be my punishment—in fact, I’ve already got these suspiciously long hairs around my mouth that I now have to get waxed off…seriously, getting old is so gross.)
Unfortunately, a family of wrens built their nest (complete with 3 eggs) in the stack of cushions we were storing on the porch. By the time we got the screen done and were ready to move the whole stack outside, nest included, there were three baby wrens in the nest instead of just eggs. What a dilemma—make birds happy, or push on with my dream of sitting bug-free on the porch.
Newsflash: I’m not a bird fan, Baltimore Orioles excepted. They creep me out—all twitchy and beady-eyed.
I spent some time trying to determine how to move the nest without dropping the babies, but finally, better people (Mom and Daughters and Niece) decided the right thing to do was to leave the nest where it was and leave the porch doors open so Mama and Daddy Bird could feed the babies and teach them how to fly. According to the internet, this takes about 2 weeks.
I was not happy to have to share my porch with my feathered friends.
So we spent the rest of the time with the doors open and citronella candles burning, watching wasps, ants, mosquitos and other creepy crawlies enjoy their new home. It was also entertaining to watch the bugs have to re-route their flight paths once the porch was enclosed in a no-fly zone–lots of smacks against the screens. Those smacking sounds were almost as satisfying as hearing a bug zapper, or hitting them with the electric for swatter.
Finally, after dodging yet another angry, Kamikaze wasp, Big Brother said, “If those birds are going to live in here with us, the least they can do is stop going out for dinner. They should eat what’s here.”
I guess even the birds need to have a Come-to-Jesus budget meeting, too.
Filed under: Misc. Humor, Travel | Tags: family, Fishing, humor, lake, mafia, Middle-Age, mobsters, south, southern, sports, subourbonmom, summer, travel, trees, Virginia
Lately, I’ve been learning a lot of things about myself—some good, but most of them not flattering. For example, as I’ve gotten older, my brain-to-mouth filter has gotten, shall we say…porous? Hard to believe, I know. But one of my most recent self-discoveries had nothing to do with the new job. It had everything to do with one of our favorite American traditions—hiding the bodies.
This week, with the 4th of July coming up and the buzz around the US Soccer Team creating a surreal sports hype I was feeling nostalgic for some American traditions. What better tradition than to devote a weekend doing yard work and drinking beer? So, we went to the lake, where we have a small house and a boat, and enough chores to keep Hubby busy burning stuff for a lifetime. One of our chores was to finally sink this year’s Christmas tree in a secret fishing spot. In theory, the sunken tree will attract crappie and other fish (if you ever see fisherman randomly sitting 20 yards or so off of…nothing, you can bet there’s a sunken tree down there somewhere). Mind you, this is
a) illegal, and
b) a messy activity involving pine sap and pine needles that are impossible to get out of indoor-outdoor carpet.
It’s also harder than you’d think. First, I had to drag the tree to the dock because some people were a little concerned about spiders and lizards. Then we tied a cinder block to the tree so it would sink (the arborist version of cement shoes). Daughters 1&2 held the tree in the water in front of the boat while we idled over to the secret spot. With a flourish we let the tree go and backed the boat away.
The tree floated like a bobber.
Or a body.
Apparently, one cinder block wasn’t enough. In the meantime, the ski boats that whirl around our little piece of lake were watching.
Hubby was getting nervous…he sat on the front of the boat, feet dangling in the water as he tried to guide the carcass with a stick.
“Stop! Back up! You can’t go that fast!” All the while the body, er, tree was bobbing up and down for the whole world to see.
Eventually, we nudged the tree back to the dock and tied two more cinder blocks to it and headed back out.
“Hurry up!” Hubby said. “You know this is illegal, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah, but everybody does it.” Pause. “Do you want to stop?”
Hubby said, in true, fatalistic accomplice fashion, “No, they’ve seen us now. We may as well finish.”
Five minutes later, we had sunk our tree, praying it was deep enough not to get hung up in someone else’s boat prop, but also hoping the fishermen would snag it often enough with their lines that they would stop trolling along our piece of shoreline at 6:00am.
The boat was littered with evidence (it still is)—pine needles in the carpet, sap on the seats and our hands and legs, like Lady MacBeth’s blood. At least three ski boats saw our crime—hopefully we looked intimidating enough (me in my tankini and Hubby in one of his soccer dad t-shirts) to scare them into silence.
So what did I learn from my near-mobster activity?
- Do your illegal activities at night—no witnesses, and it saves on your breakfast revisiting you in the form of anxiety-induced heart burn
- Use plastic sheets to keep the evidence off of your stuff—there’s a reason they always assassinate the victims with plastic bags on the floor.
- Carcasses are more buoyant than you think
- I cannot pull off acting cool when I’m doing something “illegal”—we took treated lumber to the dumpster once and I was as nervous as if we were doing a drug deal in the middle of The Jefferson
- If the first detective asked me anything about it, I’d crack like an egg.
Happy birthday, America!
Filed under: Misc. Humor, Posts, Travel | Tags: adulthood, Animal Planet, animals, Fears, flying, flying snakes, humor, news, reptiles, Scary, Science, snakes, subourbonmom, travel
Every now and then God throws an animal into the mix just to mess with us. One of His favorite things to do must be to mix up combinations of animals that don’t make sense, and see what happens. The platypus comes to mind first, and then maybe the mole, or even the jack-a-lope.
But I didn’t see the flying snake thing coming. Apparently I haven’t been watching the right Animal Planet shows—no one ever went into some piece-of-crap hoarder’s house and found snakes soaring among the rafters in Animal Cops, Houston.
Scientists have been studying how certain snakes can fly—not just drop down onto people from trees like a drunk teenager toilet papering somebody’s house. These things deliberately jump from a tree and land on another branch, or their prey.
Now, I’ve heard of flying squirrels—shoot, our local baseball team has it as their mascot (How intimidating—“Yep, I’m a big fan of The Squirrels. They’re pretty fierce this year.”)—and sure, I knew there were water moccasins that would drop out of trees onto their prey. Definitely scary-movie enough to make me stay away from all overhanging trees when I’m fishing.
Sorry, if one of those things came winging at me through the air, the last thing I’d be thinking about is “Hey, I wonder how they do that?” I’d be freaking the f**ck out!
As I said, scientists have been studying the physics of how these snakes manage to fly without appendages. They used big science terms like “vortex,” and “lift forces,” but what I took away from that is, these reptiles look a lot less like dragons flying through the air than the snakes my preschoolers cut out of paper plates.
Eeeeewwwwwww…
I’m sure Darwin would make some rational explanation about adapting and being an evolved species, but on this one I’m leaning toward creationism: I think God looked at the snake and said, “Not only are you going to make them eat the apple, little snake, but you’re going to make them soil their cute little fig leaves afterward by flying at them. That’ll teach my pesky children to disobey Me.”
So where are these snakes? They are found in lowland areas of Southeast and Southern Asia. That may be their natural habitat, but if Lionfish and those monster pythons can get to Florida via hurricane and pet stores, I’m not taking any chances. I’m thinking of moving to Arizona. At least rattlers are courteous enough to warn you before they strike.
Subourbon Mom 
